Tuesday, December 1, 202012:00 PM - 1:00 PM (Pacific Time)
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ABSTRACT
This paper analyzes the struggles between the Italian winemaking and brewing industries over the shaping of bourgeois Italian tastes and habits during the interwar decades. During the early 1920s, Fascist Italy’s Industrial Wine Lobby began unveiling a wide range of public relations and collective marketing campaigns, which were aimed at forging new ‘fashions’ or trendy collective practices among the country’s wayward middle- and upper-class consumers. The pro-wine lobby’s efforts, however, were obstructed by a variety of political and commercial challenges, including a growing competition with various 'foreign' beverage industries, such as coffee, cocktails, and, above all, beer. Between 1929 and 1931, Italian brewers’ commercial lobbying organization, the National Beer Propaganda Consortium, launched two ambitious collective marketing campaigns of their own, which were centered on discursively intertwining the beverage’s consumption with bourgeois sociability, domesticity, and 'Italian' identity. Unwilling to yield any commercial ground to domestic brewers, Italy's Industrial Wine Lobby launched a follow-up, and wide-ranging collective marketing campaign in order to both defend 'the world’s vineyard' from the 'invasion' of 'semi-barbarian' preferences, as one wine lobbyist colorfully phrased it in 1935, and, equally as important, reposition Italian wine as a wholesome and fashionable ‘national beverage’ within the eyes of the peninsula’s middle- and upper-classes. By exploring these industries' conflicts over the definition and articulation of 'Italian' taste and style during Fascism's twenty years in power in Italy, this study aims to shed further light on the myriad, and oftentimes complex, relationships between popular consumption, industrial 'fashion' dynamics, and national identity.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Brian J Griffith is the inaugural Eugen and Jacqueline Weber Post-Doctoral Scholar in European History at University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Cultivating Fascism: Wine and Politics in Mussolini’s Italy which explores the way in which wine came to be viewed as a quintessentially ‘Italian’ beverage among Italy’s middle- and upper-class households during Fascism’s twenty years in power.
Cosponsored by the UCLA Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies (ELTS) and the Italian Cultural Institute Los Angeles - Istituto Italiano di Cultura Los Angeles.
Cost : Free and open to the public. Registration is required at above link.
Sponsor(s): Center for European and Russian Studies, Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies (ELTS), Istituto Italiano di Cultura Los Angeles - Italian Cultural Institute Los Angeles